MMS • Steef-Jan Wiggers
Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ
Microsoft recently announced the general availability (GA) of Azure Managed Grafana, a managed service that enables customers to run Grafana natively within the Azure cloud platform. With the managed service, they can connect to existing Azure Services to enhance observability and cloud management.
Azure Managed Grafana is based on the open-source Grafana observability platform and is a result of the collaboration of Microsoft and Grafana that started last year. Earlier this year, Microsoft released Azure Managed Grafana in preview, allowing customers to view their Azure monitoring data in Grafana dashboards and have new out-of-the-box Azure Monitor dashboards. With the GA release, the company added new capabilities that include the latest Grafana v9.0 features with its improved alerting experience as well as zone redundancy (in preview) and API key support.
Azure Managed Grafana has several new out-of-the-box dashboards for Azure Monitor, such as the Availability Tests Geo Map dashboard for Azure Monitor application insights, where users can view the results and responsiveness of their application availability tests based on geographic location.
In addition, there is also a Load Balancing dashboard for Azure Monitor network insights, where users can monitor key performance metrics for all their Azure load balancing resources, including Load Balancers, Application Gateway, Front Door, and Traffic Manager.
Other new capabilities are:
- A new “pin to Grafana” feature for Azure Monitor Logs allows users to seamlessly add charts and queries from Azure Monitor Logs to Grafana dashboards
- New out-of-the-box dashboards for Azure Container Apps, such as an Aggregate View dashboard for Azure Container Apps, which depicts a geographic map of container apps, and a new App View dashboard for Azure Container Apps that monitors the performance of Azure Container Apps.
Stefano Demiliani, an Azure MVP< concluded in his blog post on Azure Managed Grafana:
I think that the most interesting Azure Managed Grafana feature is the possibility to configure multiple data sources (external storage backend that holds your telemetry data). Azure Managed Grafana supports today lots of popular data sources (Microsoft and non-Microsoft) like Azure Monitor, Azure Data Explorer, SQL Server, Azure SQL, MySQL, Google Cloud Monitoring, CloudWatch, Alert manager, Elasticsearch, Grapite, and many more.
Lastly, the documentation landing page shows more details on Azure Managed Grafana. And pricing details of the service are available on the pricing page.